BY STEPHANIE J. GATES, FELLOW
In response to The Danger of A Single Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The single story? Most of my life I’ve heard a variety of single stories. Fragmented. Incomplete stories shaping my life in some way.
The single story that played like a scratched record was to aspire to whiteness. It was never directly said, but it showed up. I remember being told how to behave, how to dress, how to present myself so as not to embarrass myself. My family. My race. I remember elders in the community saying things like, “Act your age not your color.” An odd saying that I would not fully understand until I began to unlearn all that I had learned about the status quo and what it means for me as an African-American woman.
My working class parents adhered to typical middle class values. They did what Americans do. They bought a house. My father’s working class salary paid for my tuition at a private university. I had a wonderful childhood. I had what I needed and what I wanted.
And yet there was always this tension in this goal of whiteness against the pride in owning and walking in blackness—which meant just being who I am without apology. These two worlds commingled and sometimes collided.
I loved writing from as far back as I can remember. I worked on the school newspaper in high school, so I decided to major in journalism in college. I thought it would be a good way for me to do what I loved and still have a real job. My parents believed in sensibility and stability. Dreams of being a writer were for white people—I thought. Even as a journalism major, I didn’t feel like I belonged. I remember being silenced and rendered invisible in my classes that were filled with mostly white men. What’s really funny, is that even though nobody told me I couldn’t be a writer, nobody told me I could be one either. So, I went with the single story: writers are white.
I remember taking a memoir writing class. It was a racially mixed class made up primarily of Black and white women. The instructor was a white woman. The first day of class she gave us a spiral notebook of writings by women that would serve as our text for the class. The book was a collection of stories written by women of all races and ethnicities. This was a pleasant surprise because during undergraduate and graduate school, I was accustomed to what I’d call Multicultural Night. It was the one night in the semester when the readings selected by the professor were writers of color all lumped together. We had 14 weeks of white writers—and one week of other.
The first selection that we read in the memoir writing class was by a Native American writer. One night we read a piece from Alice Walker and I can still vividly remember this white woman’s righteous indignation because she didn’t understand it. “I don’t like it. I just don’t like it. I don’t understand. I need to read the whole piece.” It was a selected essay. When she finished her rant, I offered my thoughts on the piece. And I went on to say that I didn’t understand everything I read because sometimes there are cultural differences that can make some reading more challenging, but it should not stop us from trying to learn.
In that same class, I also remember writing a piece about “good” hair and I saw all of the Black women in the room nod in recognition as I read it for feedback. The white women may not have understood all of the cultural references, but they could relate as women. We’ve all had issues with our hair.
When I was in grad school, my classmate wrote about an adirondack chair. I had no idea what she was talking about. I looked it up when I got home and realized that I knew what type of chair it was. I just didn’t know the name of it. I’ve read plenty of materials that I was culturally disconnected from. Seen plays that I did not understand. I left the theater once after falling asleep on an award-winning play. I got on the elevator with a man who thought it was great and asked me what I thought. I replied that I had fallen asleep.
The status quo is whiteness. Non-white people still have to conform to a standard that is acceptable to white people. Stepping into our authentic selves and walking into the world in that way comes with a price. Some are willing pay; some are not. So culturally ingrained is this idea of whiteness as normal, that we don’t recognize that the story of America is actually a series of singular stories that have been presented to us as The Story. No variation or deviation. But when you are not a character in the story, you understand that The Story is not your story.
The story of white America is but one story in the series. We need to know all the stories.
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Stephanie J. Gates is a Fellow of A Year of Courageous Conversations to explore how to foster greater inclusion and belonging in our communities. The series is presented by Urban Consulate at Barrington’s White House in Barrington, Illinois. To read more, visit CourageousConversations.us.
(Photo Credit: Linda M. Barrett)